Regex for HTML tag

Note

Finds tags, not structure. Nested or malformed HTML needs a real parser, like the browser’s DOMParser.

Matches in the example

• "<p class=\"lead\">"
• "<strong>"
• "</strong>"
• "<br/>"
• "</p>"

Token by token

1. < the character “<”
2. \/? the character “/”, optionally
3. [a-z] one of: “a” to “z”
4. [a-z0-9-]* one of: “a” to “z”, “0” to “9” or “-”, zero or more times, as many as possible
5. (?: a group, not capturing
6. \s a whitespace character
7. [^<>]* any character except “<” or “>”, zero or more times, as many as possible
8. )? end of group, whole group optionally
9. \/? the character “/”, optionally
10. > the character “>”

Other patterns

• Email address
• URL
• IPv4 address
• UUID
• Hex color
• Date (YYYY-MM-DD)
• Time (24-hour)
• US phone number
• Phone number (E.164)
• US ZIP code
• Credit card number
• URL slug
• Username
• Strong password
• HTML tag
• Semantic version
• MAC address
• JSON Web Token
• Hashtag
• @mention
• Number
• Leading and trailing whitespace
• Repeated word
• Blank lines
• Markdown link
• Quoted string
• Domain name
• File extension
• Base64
• Trailing comma